New York Independent [unsigned]
1872: 11 April

Mark Twain's new volume, Roughing It, is also in
part tropical in its subject. Among its most entertaining
chapters are those which describe the author's visit to the
Hawaiian Islands--chapters which, first published as
letters to a California newspaper, are here gathered up,
with some excisions, in a permanent form. In this work Mr.
Clemens has produced one of his more readable volumes. The
fact that he had written much of it before reaching its
present fame as a humorist is in its favor. Thackeray said
of his earlier efforts: "It makes me laugh when I think of
the old days, and how much better I wrote for them then,
and got a shilling where I now get ten." We only wish that
Mr. Clemens had made fewer alterations than he has made in
those rollicking, often ludicrous descriptions, the
Sacramento Union letters here reprinted. As it is,
we can imagine the despair with which the less intuitive
reader will struggle to separate the nonsense from the
sense, the fact from the fiction, the portraiture from the
exaggerations of these pages. Mark Twain's humor is in this
respect peculiarly and purposely tantalizing, though not,
therefore, less enjoyable. The sketches of Western life are
equally amusing. We may remark, too, that his fun is not
dependent upon bad spelling or bad grammar. He writes good
English, and we can commend the book to all who enjoy the
wild Western drollery of which Mark Twain is the ablest
living master. As a remarkably full repository of Western
slang this work has a literary interest which will give it
a permanent value to the student of Americanisms.